With the advent of the Internet, advertising over more interactive media such as websites has become popular and inexpensive. The interactive nature of the Internet enables advertisements to be targeted to users based on highly specific user-requested content, and a successful advertisement can cost as little as a few pennies.
However, despite the initial promise of cheap and efficient website-based advertisements, there remain several problems with existing approaches. Advertisers are generally required to provide their own advertisements to be displayed on websites. Creating a professional advertisement typically requires an advertiser to either maintain an internal marketing department or outsource ad design to an advertising firm. Both options can be costly, particularly for small businesses. Designing graphical advertisements internally is often difficult for small business owners who have little bandwidth to master graphical processing software, find or create attractive graphics that do not violate another's copyright, and layout the ad in a professional-looking format. Even larger firms with dedicated marketing departments must expend considerable resources to maintain an effective and current advertising portfolio.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems and methods.